Cherwell Operations will be installing OS patches on the hosting infrastructure. While we do not anticipate any customers’ service being interrupted for the entire maintenance period, you may experience disruption during the maintenance window.
Posted on Mar 12, 22:58 EDT

SafeAssign, the plagiarism check within Blackboard, is scheduled for maintenance directly by the Vendor. During this time, SafeAssign documents will not be processed and originality reports will not be generated. For more information about the maintenance, please see the below press release by Blackboard:

Bulletin/Advisory Information:
Updated Support Bulletin (Published March 22, 2018):
A new date has been identified for the SafeAssign - AWS migration which is now planned for April 2, 2018 starting at 3 am EDT. Planned downtime could extend through 10 am EDT. Please review the content of the original Support Bulletin listed below; all past details remain correct.

Updated Support Bulletin (Published March 7, 2018):
The planned SafeAssign migration to AWS recently announced for March 8th, and covered in this blog post last week, has been delayed. The SafeAssign Team has been preparing for this migration for around 12 months. Due to the size of the SafeAssign database, the plan for migrating data was based on an iterative approach which would limit downtime to a few hours. During the 12 months of planning both test migrations and a migration of the SafeAssign Staging environment were completed. Originally, these tests were thought to be successful, which led to our plan to complete the migration on March 8th.

When finalizing the migration activities of the SafeAssign production environment, we discovered a risk for issues regarding concurrency and data table inaccuracies, which could cause data corruption or loss for student submissions after the migration. This was not apparent during test and staging migrations and not something the team could easily correct before the March 8th migration.

Given the potential data loss and corruption we are postponing the AWS migration scheduled for March 8th until solutions for the identified problems can be resolved. We will publish a new bulletin when we have a new migration date.

We understand that our administrator partners have notified end-users of the disruption and we apologize for the last-minute postponement of the migration.


Original Support Bulletin (Published February 27, 2018):
On March 8, 2018 from approximately 3 AM EST to 9 AM EST, Blackboard will be performing scheduled maintenance on SafeAssign. During this time, the service will be unavailable to accept papers and any student submissions made during this period will not receive Originality Reports.

This maintenance window represents the final migration of SafeAssign into the cloud-based AWS infrastructure that has been planned since mid-2017 and began development in August. Over time, the SafeAssign Team has been slowly moving as many components of the service to AWS as possible while minimizing impact on end users. However the final components cannot reliably be migrated without the service experiencing some downtime. Once the service has been fully transitioned to AWS, the overall performance and stability of the service should be significantly improved going forward.

We are aware that any amount of downtime impacts your mission-critical learning environment. As such, our goals is to successfully perform the proactive SafeAssign maintenance in the least amount of time.”
Posted on Mar 27, 12:21 EDT

The SafeAssign migration to AWS was completed on, April 2nd 2018, however unforeseen performance concerns have arisen that require additional maintenance to resolve. To resolve the performance issues, the SafeAssign service will be migrated to a faster storage option within AWS on 04/03/2018 between the hours of 1130AM EDT and concluding around 500PM EDT. The entire migration will take several hours, however at the beginning of the migration there will be a 5-10 minute period of intermittent availability of the service. Papers submitted during this short window of downtime will need to be resubmitted, however any papers submitted after the start of the migration will be queued for processing until the migration is fully complete.
Posted on Apr 3, 12:41 EDT

On Wednesday, May 2, 2018, we will be performing routine maintenance by removing courses on Blackboard. We perform this maintenance annually to keep our Blackboard servers running smoothly and allow new courses to be created!

All courses prior to Summer 2015 will be removed from Blackboard.

Faculty are encouraged to archive the data in their courses and retain an offline copy of it for their own records; this can be done by following the instructions here: https://it.stonybrook.edu/help/kb/archiving-a-blackboard-course

Faculty may also request to retain the course on the live Blackboard server if there is a demonstrable need. Some common needs to retain a course can found below:
Course is being used as a package for tenure-track faculty who are applying for tenure,
Course content, assignments, and grading information is required for accreditation purposes ,
Course content is being linked to by a current course,
Course content is being used to develop a future course,
Course is taught less than every 2 years
If a course meets any of these needs, please fill out this form no later than Monday, April 30, 2018:
go.stonybrook.edu/keepmycourse

Thank you for your help and attention!
Posted on Apr 9, 15:26 EDT